Synthese

DOI 10.1007/s11229-016-1208-8

S.I.: MINIMALISM ABOUT TRUTH

Is truth a normative concept?

Paul Horwich1

Received: 23 February 2016 / Accepted: 26 August 2016

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: (i) distinguishing a con-
cept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; (ii) sketching
a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; (iii) respond-
ing to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument (extended in different directions
by Crispin Wright, Huw Price, and Michael Lynch) in favor of the conclusion that
truth is functionally normative; (iv) proceeding to address a less familiar route to
that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends
on the further assumption that meaning is intrinsically normative; and (v) arguing that
this further assumption is mistaken.

Keywords Truth · Normative · Concept · Meaning · Proposition · Deflationism ·

Ought · Equivalence schema · Allan Gibbard - Michael Lynch · Value of truth

Not to keep anyone in suspense, my answer is ‘no’. But perhaps suspense was never a
live possibility—for you might have thought it pretty obvious that a militant deflationist
such as myself couldn’t possibly regard “true” as a normative term. After all, we
deflationists claim that the meaning of this word is fully given by the Equivalence
Schema, “It’s true that p ≡ p”—a principle that appears to make no use of ought or
good or of any other normative concept.1

1 Deflationism is articulated and defended in Horwich (1998a), Field (1994), and in the first three chapters
of Horwich (2010). The subtly different forms of this general perspective on truth aren’t relevant here. But
for a discussion of their relative merits, see “Varieties of Deflationism” (the third of those chapters).

B Paul Horwich
ph42@nyu.edu

1 New York University, New York, USA

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Conversely: you might have thought that anyone who believes truth is normative
must have in mind Michael Dummett’s famous 1959 objection to deflationism—an
objection that has been elaborated more recently by Wright (1992), Price (1988), and
Lynch (2004). Dummett (1959) argued that the Equivalence Schema fails to capture the
concept of truth, since our endorsement of it won’t explain the enormously important
fact that we value true belief and assertion—so truth will have to be defined (at least
in part) by some normative commitment: perhaps, that the proper aim of belief is truth,
or that we ought to try to ensure that our beliefs will be true. Again, the implication
is that no deflationist—no-one who rejects Dummett’s reasoning and who therefore
continues to hold that Equivalence Schema is all that’s needed to define truth—could
maintain that the concept is normative.
But matters are not so straightforward. I’ll explain in a little while why I disagree
with these two correlated points. (This postponement is my feeble attempt to re-inject
some suspense into the paper!).
To start with, it’s necessary to settle what’s going to be meant here by saying that
a given concept is, or isn’t, “normative”. For philosophers have construed such talk
in a variety of ways. And how can our main question be sensibly addressed without a
definite idea of what that question is?
To that end, a vital first step is to distinguish between the following two senses of
“normative concept”.—On the one hand, a given concept may be a concept used to
evaluate (thereby making the term that expresses it a normative term); ought and
good are paradigm examples of such functionally normative concepts. And, on the
other hand, the application of a concept that isn’t evaluative, so isn’t functionally
normative, may well have normative significance. Its application to a thing may imply
that the thing is good, or ought to be done—or, more generally, that the thing falls
under a concept that is functionally normative.
For instance killing isn’t a functionally normative concept; we can fully explicate
it in purely naturalistic terms (roughly, as causing a death). But its application
evidently has normative significance—killing a person is prima facie wrong. Similarly,
umbrella isn’t a functionally normative concept, but its referent has normative import
since an umbrella is good to have in the rain.
Clearly, just about everything is subject to evaluation of one kind or another; so it
would be surprising if truth were an exception; and of course it isn’t. In particular,
and as Dummett rightly observed, there’s something normatively positive about true
beliefs; they are the ones that are correct; they are the beliefs we should to prefer to
have. So, like kill and umbrella, the concept truth surely does stand for something
normatively significant.
But this doesn’t show that it’s a normative concept in the way that ought is, and
that our word “true” is a normative term. For no matter how obvious and general
and basic the normative significance of a concept’s referent might be, that won’t
make the concept a functionally normative one. But it’s functional normativity, not
mere normative import, that’s our present concern. Whether a concept is functional
normativity is clearly the more controversial and interesting question about it—the

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question I think most philosophers have had in mind when they have asked whether a
given concept is normative—e.g. meaning, or pain, or belief, or truth. 2
So what would make truth a functionally normative concept? (Henceforth, I won’t
usually bother to insert the “functionally”). What’s the general criterion for being a
concept of that sort? I’ve mentioned a couple of paradigm examples—ought and
good. But how can we tell which other notions are also normative?
Here we should distinguish two kinds of answer. One kind is relatively superficial
and the other more profound. A superficial account would tell us that a concept is
normative just in case it bears a specified intimate relation to one or another explicitly
designated, paradigmatically normative concept, such as ought. Clearly such a story
simply assumes that ought is normative and makes no attempt to explain why it is.
A deeper account would not explicitly presuppose that ought (or any other des-
ignated concept) is normative, but would provide a general criterion purporting to
identify the feature of any normative concept (including ought) that’s responsible for
it being normative.
Although an account of the more profound kind would obviously be more satisfying,
it would also be harder to find and defend. And it would be nice to get to our primary
topic with a minimum of further delay. So let’s be content, for the purpose at hand,
with a superficial account.
But what should it be? Let’s suppose that ought is the sole fundamental normative
concept. This assumption isn’t really needed for my line of thought, but it simplifies
it. So our question becomes: what relation must a concept bear to the concept ought
in order to qualify as a normative concept?
Before attempting to answer that question, it’s worth noting that there’s more than
one concept expressed by the word “ought”—even after we’ve restricted its application
to a particular domain of discourse: e.g. to moral contexts, or to epistemology, or to
practical rationality.
For example, suppose that someone opts for a certain medical procedure, which
turns out to leave him much worse off than he was before. If he says, “I ought not
to have done it”, he might be admitting that he was irrational and subject to criti-
cism for not having properly taken into account the solid evidence for regarding the
procedure as extremely risky. Or he might instead mean merely that the operation hap-
pened, unpredictably, to have unwanted consequences—conceding, not that he was
irrational, but merely that if he had known all the relevant facts (including how the
operation would turn out) then it would have been irrational for him to have agreed to
it. This second sense of “ought” (the so-called objective ought) might in that way be
explained in terms of the first (the subjective ought), which is the one immediately

2 A third thing one might mean by calling a given concept “normative” is that the fact about a word in virtue
of which the word expresses that concept is articulated in functionally normative terms (e.g. that the word
ought to be used in some specified way). But whether truth in particular is “normative” in this sense is not
an especially interesting question. For if its answer if ‘yes’, that will almost certainly be because concepts
in general are normative (in that sense)—that is, because every word’s meaning what it does is constituted
by some distinctive fact about how it ought to be used (rather that some fact about how it is used). However,
if this turned out to be so, then—by a line of argument that we’ll examine later—one would have reason to
think that meaning is functionally normative; and that would in turn provide grounds for concluding that
truth is functionally normative too.

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tied to motivation and criticism. Anyway, the assumption I’m making is that it’s a
concept’s special relationship to the subjective ought that will qualify it as function-
ally normative. (In what follows, when I talk about the concept ought I’ll mean the
subjective concept).3
But what should the account be? I can think of three tempting alternatives:
(a) A concept is normative iff its analysis invokes ought. (Thus, if the analysis of x
is good is we ought to want x, then good qualifies as normative).
(b) A concept is normative iff simple applications of it entail claims of the form ‘x
ought ought to be done’ or ‘x ought not to be done’. (For example, perhaps x is
delicious entails one ought to like the taste of x).
(c) A concept is normative iff a person can fully possess it only in virtue of deploying
the concept ought. (For example, perhaps full possession of the concept gen-
erous requires having an inclination to explicitly believe that one ought to be
generous).
But I don’t like (a) because it requires that every normative concept, except ought,
must be explicitly definable. And if we philosophers have learned anything at all since
Plato, it’s that explicitly definable concepts are few and far between.
And I don’t like (b) because, although it’s perhaps less implausible that (a), still I
don’t see how we can be confident that every simple application of a normative concept
entails that sort of ought-proposition.
So—acknowledging that this issue calls for more discussion—let me settle on (c).
Notice that in making this choice I’m bending over backwards to be concessive to
those who suspect that truth is normative—because, quite plausibly, anything that’s
normative according to either (a) or (b) is also normative according to (c)—but not
the other way around.
Now at last we’re in a position to address our central question:—Is truth a norma-
tive concept? And let me start by defending the pair of unjustified claims I made at the
very beginning of this paper: namely, that we should not go along with the impression
that deflationary views of truth obviously imply its non-normativity. And nor should
we think that truth could be functionally normative only if, as Dummett maintained,
grasping it requires explicit recognition of the value of true belief.
Both of these negative claims of mine derive from the observation that although the
Equivalence Schema, “<p> is true ↔ p”, doesn’t deploy any obviously normative
concepts, still it clearly does deploy the concept of proposition.4 But our recognition
that “p” expresses the proposition that p—i.e. that this proposition is the meaning of
“p”—is essential to our grasp of that concept. So, if meaning is normative (as quite
a lot of philosophers have insisted it is), then so it proposition. And truth, will
inherit that normativity. For someone will be able to accept the Equivalence Schema
(and thereby fully possess the concept truth) only if she already possesses the concept
meaning, which will in turn presuppose possession of ought. This shows not only

3 The view is due to Ewing (1939). Let me repeat that although I’m supposing (for ease of exposition) that
Ewing’s view is correct, nothing of importance here hangs on that assumption. My main line of argument is
consistent with there being a collection of fundamental normative concepts (including perhaps the objective
ought).
4 “<p>” is an abbreviation of “the proposition that p”.

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that a deflationist might well come to accept that truth is normative, but also that a
normativist about truth needn’t base his position on the Dummettian anti-deflationist
idea that the value of truth is built into the concept.
So, at this point, we have two potential routes to the normativity of truth. Let
me first consider the more familiar route—namely Dummett’s. As we’ve seen, the
contention here is not merely that true belief is valuable. Nor is it that this value is
universally recognized. The crucial thesis is that it must be recognized by a given
person in order for her to qualify as fully possessing the concept truth.
Now I can’t think of any good reason to think that this thesis is correct. Yes, there’s
an extreme and implausible position known as “meaning-holism”, whereby everything
we say with the help of a given predicate, “f”, contributes to its meaning. But leaving
that aside, we’ll always need definite grounds, given a specific commitment of ours
concerning the property of f-ness, to suppose that this commitment is required for
possession of the concept, F. In particular, the mere fact that we recognize the value
of true belief isn’t enough to show that respect for some such norm plays a role in
grasping the concept of truth.
Such grounds would be present if it struck us as trivially analytic that truth ought
to be pursued and untruth avoided. But we don’t have that impression. Consider the
following competing interpretations of the statement, “Murder is wrong”. On one
conceivable account, the word “murder” means “wrongful killing”—in which case
the concept murder is functionally normative, the statement is true by definition,
and so it has no normative force. On another conceivable account, “murder” means
something roughly along the lines of, “premeditated killing of someone against his or
her will”. And taken in that sense, “Murder is wrong” clearly would not be analytic
and clearly would have normative force. Like many simple substantive norms it would
begin by picking out some phenomenon in entirely descriptive, naturalistic terms,
and then proceed to evaluate this phenomenon (as good, or bad, or obligatory, or
permissible, or correct, etc.).
And the idea that truth is desirable is surely in the second category. It’s something
we try to instill in our children by means of encouragement and criticism—just as
we do in the case of other substantive moral norms, pragmatic norms, and epistemic
norms. We’re surely not teaching them the meaning of the word “true”. The point of
the education is character building not linguistic expertise.
Further evidence against the Dummettian brand of normativism about truth
derives from an appealing way—an almost irresistible way—of explaining the role
of truth in ‘value of truth’ principles. This concept is doing what it’s nearly always
doing for us—serving as a device of generalization.
Consider, for example, the logical facts expressed by “Av-A”, “Bv-B”, “Cv-C”, …
and so on (where “A”, “B”, etc. abbreviate particular English sentences). Evidently
there’s some general logical fact in the offing—something that captures all those
particular ones. But how are we to state it precisely? Surely not with two or three
conjunctions of them, followed by the indefinite and imprecise, “. . ., and so on”. The
answer is that our concept of truth is tailor-made to solve this sort of problem. We can
simply say, “Every instance of <pv-p> is true”. And this captures all the particular
facts we wanted to capture. For it yields, “<Av-A> is true”, which—in virtue of

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the Equivalence Schema - entails “Av-A”. And by parallel reasoning it also gives us
“Bv-B”, “Cv-C”, and all of the other instances.
Similarly, we can very naturally regard a value-of-truth principle—for example
If something is true, then it’s better to believe it than to
disbelieve it
as exploiting the concept of truth merely to make explicit our disposition to accept
indefinitely many proposition-specific norms such as
If E = mc2 , then believing that E = mc2 is better than
disbelieving it

If pigs can fly, then believing that pigs can fly is better than
disbelieving it

and the like. No employment of truth in those. It’s only brought into the picture,
as in the case of the Law of Excluded Middle, so we can package up all the specific
commitments into a single precise and stateable principle.
And exactly the same account can be given of all the other plausible value-of-truth
principles—for example, “A belief is correct just in case it’s true” and “One ought to
want that one believes only what is true”.
It seems to me that this confirms what was earlier suggested in our discussion of
the non-triviality of belief-truth norms: namely that Dummett was mistaken—it’s not
a condition on full possession of concept truth that we appreciate the value of truth.
Now I was careful to say that my deflationist story about the role of truth in value-
of-truth principles is only almost irresistible—because it has in fact been resisted, and
in various ways. (No doubt some valiant members of the resistance are included in
the present collection!) But, for now I’ll have to confine myself to just one of their
arguments—one that’s been emphasized by Michael Lynch.
He rightly points out that, on my account, the epistemological relationship between
a general belief-truth norm, for example:
We should want that our beliefs be true
and the specific norms that it encompasses—e.g.
We should want that (we believe that pigs can fly only if pigs can fly)
is that we first come to believe some of the latter (including, let’s suppose, the very
example I just gave); we then bring in the notion of truth via the Equivalence Schema
to get, for example,
We should want that (we believe <pigs can fly> only if <pigs can fly> is true)
and we finally arrive at the universal value-of-truth principle by generalizing such
proposition-specific normative statements.
But Lynch’s objection is that this proposed inferential route makes a mystery of our
alleged premises. Why would anyone accept any of them? Why, for example, accept
the premise that we should want that we believe that pigs can fly only if pigs can fly?
Isn’t it much more plausible, he suggests, that the correct epistemological order is

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exactly the opposite of mine: that we believe these particular things by inferring them
from the value-of-truth generalization?
Well I continue to think not—and for the following reasons.
First, it’s typically the case that generalizations are justified on the basis of some
of their independently credible instances—and it would be strange if our belief-truth
norms were exceptional in this regard.
Second, I grant that in the case of such norms it’s harder than it is in many other cases
(e.g. “All ravens are black”), to recognize that it can be independently rational for us
to accept their instances. But I think that this sense of relative difficulty stems entirely
from the fact that we tend to be especially confused and puzzled by the rationality of
epistemologically basic judgments when they are a priori.
However, the fact remains that there are rational judgments of that sort; and if
we are determined to be puzzled about this phenomenon, it won’t help to suppose,
with Lynch, that they concern generalizations. We might as well allow (i) that we
have dispositions to believe the instances of certain schemata; (ii) that, in the case
of some of these schemata, the underived beliefs that instantiate them are perfectly
rational, despite being justified neither by argument nor experience; and (iii) that these
schemata include those (such as “Only if p, is it correct to believe that p” and “One
ought to desire that one believes that p, only if p”) that are easily rearticulated, thanks
to the Equivalence Schema, into our belief-truth norms.
Needless to say, it would be absurd to look for ways of justifying the underived
beliefs, or justifying our disposition to have them. The most we can hope for is to
explain why we have them. And that sort of understanding does seem to be achievable.
The explanation could well be roughly along the following lines.—So many cases
of a person’s ‘believing that p only when p’ tend to promote his or her goals, and
so many beliefs are acquired via testimony, that communities, simplifying for the
sake of effectiveness, inculcate a disposition to accept all instances of ‘I should try to
ensure that I believe that p only if p’—where the “should” is no longer to be construed
instrumentally.5 So it seems to me that we are able to get a rough sense of why we are
inclined to accept specific instances of a belief-truth normative generalization without
deducing them from it.
So much for why I think we must reject the Dummettian rationale for supposing
that truth is functionally normative.
Let me now turn to the second above-sketched route to this conclusion.—It’s that
the truth-defining Equivalence Schema is, appearances to the contrary, a normative
principle in virtue of its deployment of the concept of proposition, which depends
on the concept of meaning, which is normative.

5 Let me emphasize that the norms at issue here concern the value for its own sake of true belief. They are
not assertions of what we should do for practical reasons, i.e. for the sake of achieving our non-epistemic
goals. They apply across the board—even to beliefs whose truth or falsity can obviously have no practical
implications. This is not to deny that we do also respect certain relatively restricted instrumental belief-
truth norms. This respect probably can be explicitly justified by showing how it promotes the satisfaction
of our desires. But that justification cannot transfer over to the non-instrumental belief-truth norms under
discussion here. The most that can be conjectured (as suggested in the text) is that our justified acceptance
of the limited instrumental norms might help explain our attachment to ‘the value of truth for its own sake’.
For further discussion, see Horwich (2014).

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The view that meaning is normative has many illustrious advocates—for example,
Kripke (1982), McDowell (1984), Gibbard (1994, 2012), Brandon (1994), Hawthorne
and Lance (1997), Boghossian (2005), and Ginsborg (2011). But are they right? I think
not. But before I explain why, I’d like to digress for a minute to try to persuade you
that, even if they are right—even if truth is normative in virtue of presupposing the
concept of meaning—it would only be a little bit normative.
That’s because the above-emphasized function of truth—its being a device of
generalization—can be performed (although admittedly not quite as well) by a some-
what weaker concept—namely, a concept of idiolectal sentential truth, truth∗ME ,
that’s captured by the disquotation schema
My “p” is true∗me ↔ p
This schema can be applied by each individual exclusively to the sentences of her own
idiolect. It involves no meaning-related notions, hence no suspicion of normativity.
However—since its attributions of truth∗ME to utterances are equivalent to the utter-
ances themselves—it will nonetheless provide a much needed way of expanding the
range of phenomena about which generalizations can be formulated (including logical
phenomena, as we have seen).
Still, this device is somewhat limited. It doesn’t specify the circumstances in which
sentences beyond one’s own idiolect are true*. Therefore, it can’t be used to express
agreement (“That’s true”) with what someone else says or thinks. And, a fortiori, it
can’t be used to capture generalizations about such matters (“None of Sid’s claims is
true”).
It’s this defect that’s rectified by recourse to ‘that’-clauses (such as “that dogs
bark”), which designate the propositions expressed by (i.e. the meanings of) their
component sentences. Our possession of the concept, proposition, is grounded in
our recognition of the circumstances in which we can reasonably accept instances of
“Utterance, u, means that p”. And with that concept in play we can supplement the
above disquotational device with the principle that a sentence is true* if and only if the
proposition it expresses is true—arriving at the equivalence schema, “The proposition
that p is true if and only if p”. We’re then in a position to generalize instances of those
schemata that concern the assertions and thoughts of others (—such as, “If Sid claims
that p, then not p”).6
Thus meaning isn’t involved in the heart of the concept of truth—only in a sec-
ondary peripheral part of it. That’s what I mean by saying that even if meaning is
normative that wouldn’t make truth normative through-and-through, but only a little
bit.

6 I’m leaning here on Hartry Field’s ingenious step-by-step reconstruction of our commitment to the
full disquotation schema. See Field (1986). It might be objected to both of us that even in applying the
basic, restricted idiolectal schema, a person must appreciate that her quoted sentence (to which “true∗me ”
is attributed) has the same meaning as the sentence she uses (on the right hand side) to specify its truth
condition. So she must already possess the concept meaning! And so there would appear to be no disquo-
tation schema that’s stripped down to the point that a grasp of that concept isn’t presupposed. But such a
concession would be premature. One way of avoiding it is to restrict the basic schema to idiolects in which
there aren’t any ambiguities. And an alternative way (—see Horwich, “A Defense of Minimalism”, chapter
3 of Truth-Meaning-Reality, op. cit.) is to let the basic schema take the form, “The immediately following
sentence is true iff p”. (My thanks to an anonymous Synthese reviewer for pressing me on this point).

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But is meaning normative in the first place? Let’s compare the potential reasons
to say “yes” with the potential reasons to say “no”.
Applying the conclusions reached at the outset of this paper about what it takes in
general for a word (or for the concept it expresses) to be normative:—one can establish
that “meaning” is normative only by showing that a full understanding of this term
rests in part on an understanding of “ought”. But how might that be done?
One possible strategy (adopted by Gibbard 2012) is to try to make it plausible that
any attribution of meaning to a given word analytically entails a simple proposition
about how that word ought to be used. Perhaps, for example: <S’s word w means and>
entails <S ought to use w as we ought to use “and”>. Or perhaps, more specifically,
it entails <S ought not to reject a given sentence, u, whilst accepting the result of
operating with w on a pair of sentences, one of which is u>.
But convincing evidence for such analytic entailment claims is hard to come by. For
it wouldn’t be enough that the corresponding material conditionals be true—or even
that they be both necessarily true and a priori knowable. All the mere truth of those
conditionals would show is that meanings, like umbrellas, have normative import.
And all that their necessary and/or a priori truth would show is the necessity and/or
apriority of their normative import.
Analytic entailment is another matter, and there’s reason to doubt that meaning-
attributions bear such an extremely tight relation to simple ought-propositions. For
one thing, attributions of the form, <Our word “f” means F>, are trivial—surely not
informative enough to analytically entail debatable contentions as to how “f” should
be used. And for another thing, specifications of the distinctive normative imports of
distinct meaning-attributions appear to have substantial critical force—they are used to
correct a person’s usage. But, as we saw in the context of our initial discussion of ‘value
of truth’ norms, analytic entailments have no such force. (Our paradigm example was
that if “x murdered y” analytically entails “x acted wrongly”, then “murder is wrong”
doesn’t articulate a genuine norm).
A second way of trying to show that “meaning” is a normative term would be to
argue that the meaning-constituting fact about that word is some regularity in how
it’s used in relation to the word “ought”. (Perhaps it’s our tendency to accept the
material conditional, “If w means the same as v, then w and v ought to be used in
the same way”.) But again, supporting evidence for the general idea is elusive. And
as for the specific proposal used to illustrate the idea, a point against it is that the
alleged meaning-constituting fact is our acceptance of a principle that appears to have
substantive normative force. But it’s hard to think of any substantive norm that must
be respected in order for the expression designating the evaluated phenomenon to be
fully understood. For example, we don’t need to agree that killing a person is prima
facie wrong in order to fully understand the expression, “killing a person”. Similarly,
it would seem, a person’s failing to accept, “Words with the same meaning should be
used in the same way”, still permits him to have a full understanding of “meaning”.
A third normativist strategy (mentioned in footnote 2 above) would be to argue that
the properties of words that ground their meanings invariably concern how the words
ought to be used. For it’s indeed hard to see how that could be so unless the superficial
meaning facts to be constituted—i.e. facts articulated with the word “meaning”—were
themselves normative.

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But the initial claim here is quite implausible compared with its polar opposite:—
that meaning-properties are always grounded non-normatively. For the most plausible
view of their constitution will be the one that best squares with our central pre-
theoretical convictions about what such properties are supposed to explain and how
their presence is recognized. More specifically, it’s obvious common sense: (i) that,
whenever we accept and utter a sentence, that is explained in part by what we mean
by it (and therefore by the meanings of the words in it); and (ii) that we discover (via
inference to the best explanation) that what others means by a certain term of theirs
is just what we mean by a given word of our own, by observing that they tend to use
theirs in the same basic way that we tend to use ours.7
Thus we might well expect what grounds the meaning-property of a word to be the
common factor in all of the thousands of explanations of the thousands of particular
events that consist in one or another sentence containing the word being accepted. And
if “meaning” is intended to designate a basic tendency of use then one can begin to see
how this might be so, and one can thereby understand why the epistemological bases
for meaning-attributions are what they are. However, on the face of it, a normative
property of the word won’t do, since—on the face of it—how a word ought to be used
cannot help to explain how it actually is used.8
This emphasis on the naturalistic features of meaning is not to deny that some of our
pre-theoretical convictions about it are normative—e.g. that if a word of ours means
dog then we should want that we apply it only to dogs; and that if a symbol, “#”, of
ours means and then inferences from “p # q” to “p” are legitimate. But as we have seen,
there’s no reason to deny that these (like nearly all other normative propositions) are
substantive—that they articulate the normative imports of phenomena (in this case,
meanings) that are characterized in purely naturalistic terms. Nor is there any reason
to doubt that our acceptance of such norms can be explained via the conative attitudes
we have towards the meaning-properties so characterized.
We can conclude, I believe, that the meaning-properties of words are grounded
naturalistically at every level, and therefore that the conception of w’s meaning that’s
implicit in our pre-theoretical convictions is not well accommodated by supposing
that it’s functionally normative. So I think we can safely say that meaning-attributions

7 It might be thought that a simple alternative route to the conclusion that meaning is not normative could
proceed by arguing (following Mill and Russell) that word-meanings are just objects and properties, and
that sentence-meanings and propositions are just ordered n-tuples of such things. But this would be to
confuse (i) the fact in virtue of which a word has certain meaning, with (ii) whatever is meant by the word.
It may well be that the meaning itself, the thing meant, is picked out by a non-normative concept, whilst
the relational property of possessing that meaning is normative.
8 Gibbard (2012) argues, on the contrary, that normative meaning-properties can after all explain non-
normative facts of word-use, because those properties are constituted naturalistically. But, although it’s
indeed plausible that the ways we ought to use our words depend on how we tend to use them, the view
that this dependence is just like the dependence of water on H2 O—i.e. that it’s a matter of constitution,
or grounding, or reduction, or property identity—strikes me as quite implausible. Even if the fundamental
moral norm were that pleasure (and only pleasure) is good, we surely couldn’t conclude that pleasure and
goodness are exactly the same thing. For detailed discussion see Horwich (forthcoming).

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are not normative.9 —From which it follows that the conceptual dependence of truth
on meaning won’t make truth intrinsically normative (not even a little bit).
Thus if deflationism is correct—if truth is captured by the schema, “The propo-
sition that p is true iff p”—then it’s not a functionally normative concept. And there’s
substantial reason to think that this schema is indeed fully adequate.—Certainly it’s
better than any of the traditional definitions of truth, based for example on cor-
respondence, provability, utility, or consensus.10 Granted, we mustn’t neglect the
Dummett-Wright-Price-Lynch pro-normativist and anti-deflationist considerations.
But these fail on various grounds, as we have seen. So the bottom line is that our
critical analyses of the two potential routes to the normativist view of truth (one via
belief-truth norms, and the other via the alleged normativity of meaning) leave us,
not only with no reason to adopt that view, but with good reason to reject it.11

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9 Needless to say, the above critique of the view that meaning is normative doesn’t at all do justice to
the voluminous literature advocating that view (including the works cited Kripke 1982; McDowell 1984;
Gibbard 1994, 2012; Brandon 1994; Hawthorne and Lance 1997; Boghossian 2005; Ginsborg 2011). But
I hope to have at least supplied the outlines of a promising strategy of refutation. For a fuller treatment see
Horwich (forthcoming). Some earlier reactions against the normativist perspective are: Horwich (1998b),
Wilkforss (2001), Horwich (2005), Hattiangadi (2006) and Gluer and Wilkforss (2009).
10 See footnote 1 (above) for some references to works in which the merits of the deflationary view of truth
are elaborated.
11 This paper is based on presentations at the University of Venice workshop on “Truth” (September 2014),
at the University of Connecticut conference on “Alethic and Logical Pluralism” (April 2015), and at the
Monte Verita meetings on “Truth and Ground” (May 2015). I would like to thank the organizers of these
events for giving me the opportunity to try out my ideas on this subject, and the participants for helping me
to kick them into better shape. In addition, I’m grateful to Cory Wright, Joe Ulatowski, and the Synthese
reviewers for further suggestions as to how my initial draft could be improved.

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Wright, C. J. G. (1992). Truth and objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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